


Gentlemen of Decayed Knowledge

by great-pan-is-dead (TheCrimsonDream)



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Books, Brooding, Character Development, Fate & Destiny, Gen, Headcanon, Historical References, Literature, POV First Person, Philosophy, Reading, Unresolved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 18:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6717046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCrimsonDream/pseuds/great-pan-is-dead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the forgotten years, in a forgotten place, time becomes aimless in the last months spent on the plantation. Surrounded by a coexistence of life and death, Louis searched for any wisdom as to how to be alive.<br/>-<br/>ITWV era</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gentlemen of Decayed Knowledge

**Author's Note:**

> Louis POV  
> Early Interview with the Vampire era  
> sort of headcanon, a.k.a I went to historical attractions and got inspired.

  The abandoned wings of the Pointe du Lac house became a graveyard in its late years, but one that shone a withered green in the last hints of light and seemed to take on a life of its own, breathing the night and living on where I could not follow. Sighing fragrant winds as the plantation crept in; the library in particular in the long shadows of the west reaches becoming loving victim to the vines twining through the window panes, carpeting becoming moss. It was no large collection, only humble: what could have gathered in the new born years of the land, volumes in French taken with the family from overseas. I happened upon the room aimlessly in my last year there- most of the mansion locked up- to discover it in such a way.

  I started reading the books then. All of them all over again as if preparing for when I finished them all, I would have to go away.

  All books of natural sciences and studies, of men who travelled the world and history in a home tongue, poems and prose and vast religious accounts in Latin, ancient philosophy in Greek, I read. I searched this small forest of knowledge for anything where I might find myself again, only to find pages and pages of inked words that resonated in my head like a ticking clock.  
  Sometimes he sat with me, or stood nearby where he thought he was out of sight, out of mind, but the glittering fiend still somehow possessed that breathing, living quality that I did not and it glowed in his presence like some poisonous creature with marvellous wings. Mocking me, a devil in my dark that laughed as I grew to love and grinned with bitter lips, a mouth full of perfect broken pearl.  
  I came to conclusions- theories- if little else. One was clear: if Socrates told truly what wise men were, I decided Lestat may have been one of those men who thought they were wise alone. That if he were the other, then in hiding it he must surely have been a tactless actor and a true wicked. Despite everything, all the knowledge in the world could not have bettered my heart as I took too long to discover. Nothing could shed a light on it and I only found what I was not and never what I could be, my soul a great open wound that I fumbled to right.  
  The pages as I moved on became damper in the summer rains that seeped through the walls and looming ceiling, the intricate plaster peeling to fall as blossom to shower the floor. My aims too became dampened with them, and I grew rooted in looking for wisdom in words meant for art: written for instinct and emotion, the poetical only too sobering that I no longer lived life how one should have lived it, for I could not help but feel I lived none at all. Instead, there grew hours, days, on end where the duty to Lestat’s estranged father was near dissolved in our tropical cavern of forget, another guilt to fester, lime moonlight chasing the glow of a candle and brave hearth, no words daring to break echoes. Everything I once owned soon to return back to the wooded world whence they came before I could catch up, as I wished to return to also.

  The time came when I had to go away, but it was out of joint, and I was a failed missionary.

  When I fled with the fire behind me: I had not come close to finishing. Racine’s _Phèdre_ left, the promised oaths of the dishonoured Hippolyte and Aricia never to see its discourse, or to flee as I had. What a parallel it was, if the same gentile nature and poetry had been what I and Lestat were. I was not to learn the fate of it until many years later. Only a few scenes from last, it lay on an oaken side table where the varnish had worn away and the swollen wood had cracked; to come to ash.  

 

  A night in a New Orleans theatre decades after that Lestat’s fancies had brought us to had him crack a laugh that was not quite cruel, to see me laced to the recital performed on stage that I now saw the conclusion to. It would have been better had I been more ashamed to show the desire I had to hear of it, for of course Lestat did not understand it. I left with him then out into the streets that glowed golden in lamps, defying the night, and the thought came to me that we had made it far further than the doomed pair and flourished in our own way, be it damned as it was.  An exulted content rushed at me as I chanced the near taste of the mould of the books in the air once more, in the familiar echoes of Lestat clicking his heels across the cobbles in a light tune: a relief that I was no longer in my open prison in the dark and damp, no longer decaying with all I thought I knew.

  It was rather like being alive.

 

* * *

 

Referenced-  
[Phèdre (Phaedra) by Jean Racine](http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Phaedra.htm)

 

 


End file.
